Sunday, July 31, 2011

Noah's Time Theory



Like other people who experience life as a constant struggle for enlightenment, Noah Goldstein thought he hit upon the answer. It came as he was walking down Broadway toward Times Square. God is time. We make our peace with time and we make our peace with the universe. If we can only let instant after instant wash over us without protest, we will align with our true selves and begin to flow in the general direction of things, rather than swimming like fish upstream.

"God is time," said Noah Goldstein draining into Soho like a fig leaf charting its course toward the sea.

When he returned to his Midwood Brooklyn room, he began furiously writing down his thoughts.

Noah Goldstein was indisputably handsome, tall, dark skin, with brown curly hair cropped close around the sides exploding out of the top of his head. In the summer, he wore a t-shirt, shorts and hiking boots. In the winter he wore wool pants, a sweater and the same hiking boots. He took pride in rarely purchasing new clothing. This and other staunch dogmas made long term relationships a rare occurrence in his life, but he had no shortage of one night stands.

His peaks were times of high adventure and danger, when he could be arrested, beat up, or made passionate love to by a total stranger. During his valleys he would retreat to his room and only come out to make trips down to the store. His floor mates, a girl and a boy from Brooklyn College, could here him in his room cursing himself, his family, god, life. Once, after hearing the impact of blows on skin, they called the police. They were mainly tolerant, concerned people and so rather than making a big deal about it, they choose to tolerate Noah, his highs and lows, that he could be the life of the party, that he could shut everything down with a sudden outburst.

Noah Goldstein's parents were dead. They had died one after the other in 2007-08, his father from a heart attack and his mother from a rare form of stomach cancer that took her swiftly. They left him 75,000 dollars and a house in Massachusetts, which he rented out, making him financially independent. Since he had studied history in college, he was otherwise unemployed although not totally without ambition.

In his spare time, he read zoology textbooks: he thought he might like doing something physical, and he had always loved animals, perhaps more than people. He could imagine himself someday working in a Zoo, tending to chimps perhaps. When he was happy, he took long walks through the city and occasionally made short lived friendships in neighborhood hang outs, mainly with outdoor enthusiasts and marijuana types who thought he was one of them.

During his peaks, he was extremely charismatic but simply didn't think straight. During his valleys, he felt mostly hate toward everything and everyone, especially God. But there were moments in between when he understood he had to change, and he drank the dregs of those moments, searching for answers within himself, finding only short term inspirations which, if he was lucky, vanished with the onset of a new emotional state and if he was unlucky continued to prey upon him as new obsessions.

***

He picked up an older woman in a midtown Starbucks. To be precise, she picked him up. He caught her staring at him. He approached her, stood looming over her, said, "Hi." She invited him back to her apartment on the upper east side.

"Oh, I think I like you," she said. "I think I'd like to take you home with me."

Her name was Julia. She was petite with long dark hair, dark skin. The way her jeans hung down over her heals spoke to him of wealth and grace and a state of being fairly distant from his own. Her building had a doorman, a chandelier in the mirror-lined lobby. Her apartment was truly nice, truly comfortable, like a big, expensive goose down pillow. The lap of luxury. The degree of comfort felt alien, strange, as if he had just returned home from a war. He laughed on the inside, feeling indifferent, scornful, aroused.

"We have the same skin," she said. "Are you Jewish?"

He answered her.

"Me too!" she walked to the large steel refrigerator, poured two glasses of white wine. "Ice cube? You know, have you been to Israel? I've always wanted to go!" said Julia, returning with the wine.

He laughed inwardly. It seemed like such a conversation piece, the obvious thing a 42-year-old Jewish woman would say lacking anything else to say. He muttered something, leaned in, kissed her.

"Go slowly!" she said.

In his memories, he remembers himself as a creature with no voice, just someone humping Julia on her upper east side couch. In his memories, he is present at the time without being fully, totally there. He is a ghostly presence throughout his past.

"You're such a tiger!" said Julia.

Tiger, he thought. Something an old Jewish lady says to her young lover.

They lay on the couch in each other's arms. "I think I'm going to like getting to know you. Are you going to like getting to know me?" she asked.

When she was in the bathroom, he fled. He encountered himself floating toward Central Park, overjoyed. It was a pure, chemical joy: a narcotic ecstasy. A moment later as he was crossing Amsterdam Ave, he crashed, realizing what happened, what it meant. It meant something. He treated it like nothing. She wanted it to mean something. She wanted meaning. She wanted to create a story with him, about a woman a little older, but still very youthful and attractive, and her younger wild lover. She didn't seek out men at random: she sought out him. She didn't care about wealth, about money. All she wanted was meaning. He recalled the things she said about things like that never happening to her, about her ordinarily not doing those wild, forbidden things. He recalled sitting there, an empty-headed slightly scornful sex-seeking vessel. That's when, walking down Broadway, the idea came. Time.

***

The problem is man's relationship with time, he wrote. We cannot let ourselves flow smoothly. His yellow curtain ruffled in the breeze. He could see out across his yard into his neighbors yard where a chubby lady in a bikini baked herself brown. "If we can only make peace with time," he wrote. Noah sat, pouring himself out onto one of the note pads he prefered over his laptop which he rarely used. He was sweating in the white t-shirt he bought in a packet of similar t-shirts which he pleanned to wear weak after weak until it became a ripped, tattered rag.

At night, he lay in his bed, remembering Julia's body. He could not seem to make peace with time. The memory of her body interceded. The memory was like a fury preying on him, pushing him toward an abyss. The memory was right there at the cusp of his mind, uncensored, uncut. She offered him her own self-same eden. What led him to treat the situation like that?

He shook himself out of his trance. Time. He wwas not letting time wash over him as he should have. He was swimming against God. He tried to empty his mind. He succeeded. He slept. In the morning, the memory of Julia's body seemed less pressing.

"Time is God and God is time," he announced to his flat mates studying in the living room. They exchanged worried looks. He marched out into the daylight, walking down Cony Island Avenue. He felt that he finally hit upon the proper current; was finally flowing in the proper direction.

Since it was Friday, the Jewish occupants of Midwood were busy shopping for the shabbos. He popped into the grocery store. He wanted bananas. He resolved to only eat bananas this week to see what becomes of him. The store was full of men with beards and hats and women with wigs, dark dresses. Time is god, time is god, time is god, he thought. Only he was not thinking it: he was saying it.

"What's do you mean, time is God?"

"Yes," he smiled, caught in his madness. "Time is God."

"Are you Jewish?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to come to shabbos? Come with me to shabbis! My name is Mordecai Decantalon."

"Decantalon."

"It's Ladino."

"Ladino."

"What's the matter? You only say one word at a time?"

"I'm fucked in the head."

"Come to shabbos with me. Here, come on."

He shopped with Mordecai Decantalon. "Onions, check, bread check, chicken, check," said Mordecai. "I usually don't buy wine. I don't see how alcohol enhances the gathering, but today, here, why don't we get some." He reached for a bottle.

He piled into Mordecai's car, sat in the passenger's seat. Mordecai told him about his life.

"My great grandfather was in the paper business, my grandfather was in the paper business, but my father wanted to work in show business and so moved to Hollywood where, at 40 he realized that he couldn't continue."

"What happened?"

"What do you think? He was living in a little room somewhere, writing screenplays, eating beans every meal. In short he was miserable."

"So, what did he do?"

"He moved to Israel. Went to live on a kibbutz. Met my mother, Sabina, the daughter of German Jews who had fled Germany in the 1930's."

"They got out just in time."

"Yes they did. And so my father decided to move back to New York with Sabina."

"But what did he do?"

"What do you mean, what did he do?"

"I mean, when he came back. Screenplays?"

"He made a life. He started as other men do, with nothing but the love of a good woman, and made a life. He worked in a restaurant for a while. Then, after a few years, he opened Perry's Pizza. Now we have three kosher pizza restaurants and it's the family business."

Noah had truly never conceived of life like this. You start out with the love of a good woman and then make a life. It ran totally counter current to his time theory, or to any of the other theories espoused to him by psychologists and self help books. It was totally backwards from everything he had learned.

"You can do that too, Noah."

"I guess I could."

"Of course you could! How old are you?"

"27."

"My father was 40 when he met my mother. When he was 42, he was a busboy at the Star Of David Cafe. When he was 43 he had me. When he was 44, he opened the first Perry's Pizza."

"How did you survive."

"What do you mean, how did we survive?"

"I mean at first, when you were born."

"My father and mother rented a room, lived cheaply, drank water instead of wine."

Noah laughed.

"Yeah! said Mordecai, not so hard. Life isn't so hard."

They pulled up on front of a nondescript brick house on a quiet street. Mordecai introduced Noah to his family, his wife Sylvia and his daughter Sabina and son Micah. The children came rushing up to him to embrace his legs. The evening seemed so full of quiet, moderated joy. As if a cork had been removed, after he told him about the death of his parents, language came to him in a torrent of child speak.

Then, later as they were walking through the quiet evening with the other promenading families, Mordecai said. "Come back next week and the week after and we'll discuss finding a good woman for you."

"First the woman and then the life?"

"The woman is always first, and then comes life. Without woman, life is impossible. That's how God intended it. We'll discuss it man to man."

Laying in bed at home in his room, the shabbos candles still dancing before his vision, he thought of Julia.

"I think I'm going to like getting to know you," Julia had said.

He wondered if things like that always happened to Julia. He wanted to tell her about the simplicity Mordecai envisioned. He wanted to ask for her forgiveness, and then if she granted it, sit with her at a table by candle light and to tell her all about his time theory.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The King's Highway Rabbi



Tony of Bensonhurst Brooklyn was feeling low as he stood out in front of Vincent's Barbershop with Mickey and Mikey and Joey.

"Can't we break this stereotype?" asked Tony, watching a pretty girl across the street walk by.

The girl was fine and they all wanted her with the unthinking, hopeful want of people who offer nothing but self-obliviousness.

"What stereotype?" Mickey and Mikey asked.

Joey belched. He was drinking out of one of those bottles of wine that come with the wicker holder.

None of them were doing anything with their lives. Their parents worked. Mickey's dad was a made man, commuted over to Jersey to muscle small contractors. Mikey's dad worked for transit authority and Joey dad owned a pizza parlor called Pisa Pie.

Tony's Dad sold medical equipment from his home office. He liked wop literature, Dante, old Roman stuff. He was always holding forth about ancient Rome. Tony knew it all by heart. From Romulus and Remus to the Decline and Fall.

"Scipio Africanus," Tony muttered out in front of Vincent's.

"What?" asked Giuseppe.

"Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal in 202 BC."

"Did you say your mother's an animal and needs to pee? How rude!"

"Yes, that's exactly what I said," said Tony. "Listen, I gotta go."

"Where ya goin Tony?"

"I just got to get out of here."

"He wants to break free!" sang Mickey and Mikey.

"Yeah, well fuck you then!" said Joey. "Go suck a dick mother fucker, fagot, queer."

"Tony's a fagot!"

"Fuck you people, god damned stereotypes. You know what the problem with you people is?"

"What? What's the problem, Tony?"

"None of you have any information."

"Like what information should we have, Tony?"

"Like historical information."

"Like whose been sleeping with Mikey's sister?"

"Hey, fuck you Joey."

The farther he walked down toward the sea, the more he began to think about the things Stacey had told him.

"You've got to see the Rabbi," Stacey had said.

They were laying in Stacey's bed in her room in the Midwood apartment she shared with two other girls. Stacey was an orderly at Beth Israel hospital. That's where she heard about the Rabbi. She was a gorgeous blond. Tony never had bad luck with women.

"I don't need to see no Rabbi."

"He'll help you!" she said. "He helped my brother, you know my brother Barry? You know Barry, don't you, red hair, big head, tiny face, kind of mongoloid."

"Yeah, I know Barry."

Barry was one of those guys all he ever does is walk. If you lived in the neighborhood for long enough, you'd know him: that redheaded guy always walking, carrying on conversations with himself. Once they had cleaned up Stacey's yard together. Someone left a bunch of plywood back there and they wanted to have a barbecue.

"We'll, the doctor said he had Tourette's Syndrome, do you know what that is? Tony? Are you listening to me baby?"

"Yeah, I'm listening."

"Well, so we're there, Barry, me and Doctor Hershel, when Doctor Hershel's brother walks in, Noah Hershel. You know Noah Hershel?"

"How the fuck should I know Noah Hershel?"

"Well, Noah Hershel says he doesn't have Tourette's. He's just got to see the Rabbi. The Kings Highway Rabbi. Of course, Doctor Hershel didn't like that, but after when we were leaving, I got his address from Noah Hershel and we went to visit and look, now Barry, my brother Barry's got a job!"

"Where's he working?"

"At the biali place on Avenue T."

"That's a good place. Can he get me some free bialis?"

Tony lay looking at the ceiling listening to the gorgeous blond. He felt near and far, connected and loosened.

"See the Rabbi! You've got to see the Rabbi!"

***

Now, Tony was thinking about his life, how strangling himself with the extension cord just seemed the thing to do at the time. First he was out with Mickey and Mikey and some other so and sos. He hardly had anything to drink. The idea didn't seem that bad. It just popped in there when he got home.

"Get that cord off your head you stupid Umbrian jack ass! What are you doing?" his father said, taking out his swiss army knife, unfolding the blade and cutting the cord where it lay taught between the radiator and Tony's neck.

"I just wanted to see what it felt like!"

"What do you mean you just wanted to see what it felt like! You stupid wop. Look at you! I don't know what that gorgeous little blond dish sees in you, you stupid shit stick!"

"I'm sorry Dad!" Tony said.

Later than evening, Tony's Dad was sitting in front of the fireplace reading out of one of his jumbo books. He had stoked a roaring fire, although it was only October.

"Get the fuck out of here!" his father said sensing his presence at the entryway. "Kids getting his rocks polished ten times a week, and he's still a shit bird."

***

Standing around eating cheese fries at Nathan's on Cony Island, Tony decided to do two things. To see the Rabbi and then to propose to Stacey. He would say, "Look, Stacey, I saw the Rabbi. Now, will you marry me?"

And she would cry and of course she would say yes and then he would move in with her.

***

The Rabbi's house was located in the King's Highway neighborhood, which is a part of Brooklyn where a lot of different kinds of people lived mashed up against each other. It's a fairly decent part, lot's of bargains, cheap junk, restaurants. A fairly decent American place. Tony took the Q train up there.

He had been to King's Highways several times, usually by accident. It was the kind of place you ended up after you got drunk and wandered around at night. You'd come upon it and say, "King's Highway. Shit." It was a sure sign that your thoughts had strayed and it was 4 am.

Now it was about 3 pm on a Thursday. Tony wondered if the Rabbi would be home as he knocked on the door of the brick townhouse right around the corner from the shop and stores.

"Yeah, uh," I think I got the wrong house, he said when he saw the hippie.

It was a big hippie with blond dread locks, a blond beard and a red face.

"You won to see da Rabbi?" the hippie asked in a weird kind of accent.

"Yeah, does he live here?"

"Come on up," said the hippie.

The hippie followed him up a flight of steps. He opened the door at the top, entered a dark room. The rabbi sat at the opposite end of the room next to another door. Tony knew he was the rabbi for his Jewish regalia, although his white shirt was unbuttoned all the way, which was unusual. A slender white beard ran from his narrow face all the way down his chest to his crotch. The face itself was all nose and glasses and just a trace of mouth. He wore a large fedora. A loud stationary fan positioned against the wall jerkily craned its neck to the left and the right.

The hippie closed the door.

On the other side of the door was a large Chinese man. A Chinese body builder.

"What the fuck is this?" asked Tony.

"What the fuck do you think it is, mother fucker? You came to see me, didn't you? Now what's the problem," said the tiny Rabbi. His voice was disproportionately deep, melodic, mocking.

"What?"

"What's the fucking problem? How am I supposed to help you if you don't tell me what the god damned problem is you stupid Tuscan schmuck."

"Hey, fuck you!" said Tony, turning to leave.

But the hippie and the Chinese guy held him fast.

"Oh no you don't," said the rabbi. "You leave through this door, not that door, this door!" he patted the door next to him. "Enter in one end and come out the other, like a big piece of shit."

Tony suddenly felt afraid of the other door. It was painted those hippie rasta colors. The house wasn't that big, and he couldn't imagine what lay beyond. The room had no windows.

"Now, let's start at the top."

"Hey, fuck you I ain't telling you..."

The Chinese punched him in the side of his face, hard. Tony felt like he was about to black out. He had never been hit that hard before, or so he could recall. Suddenly, Tony was terror struck. "Do you know who I am? I have friends. Mickey's dad is a made man." Or was it Mikey's? At the spur of the moment, he couldn't remember.

"Do you think I give a fuck about Mickey's dad?" asked the Rabbi, turning his head. He had a two dimensional quality, as if, if he were to turn totally to the side all you would see would be a black line descending down from a nose with glasses attached to a large fedora.

"Now the sooner you start talking, Tony, the sooner this will be all over with."

"I'm depressed, ok?" Tony felt himself begin to speak the truth.

"What are you depressed about, nice slice of lasagna like you? I bet you got a nice big cock," said the rabbi.

Tony felt tears run down his cheeks.

The hippie and the Chinese body builder began to laugh.

"You want me to suck it for you?" asked the rabbi. "Suck your big cock? Would that make you feel better?"

"I ain't a fag!" Tony sobbed.

"What? Who's a fag? Are you calling me a fag, fagot?" asked the rabbi.

"No, I'm not calling you a fag. I'm just saying that I ain't a fag."

"Just teasing!" said the rabbi. "Stop being so sensative! There are no gay orthodox Jews, didn't you know that? Or so they say. And besides, I'm sure you got a nice girl, big calzone like you. You got a girl, Tony?"

"Yeah."

"What's her name?"

"Stacey."

"She a hot little blond who loves to suck..."

"Stop it!"

"Ok! I"m sorry! I'm sorry! Got a job?"

"No."

"What do you want to be?"

"I don't know. Maybe a hard hat."

"Hard hat? This boy says he wants to be a hat!"

The Chinese remained mute, but the hippie broke down laughing hysterically. "A hot!" he repeated. He had some weird European accent, said the word hat like hot. "He wans to be a hot!"

"No, come on, serious. What do you want to be? What did you want to be when you were a little kid?"

Tony thought back to when he was a little kid. He desperately searched his memories. At first there was nothing, but then it all came back. There was only one thing he really wanted to be, ever. And did he ever want to be that thing. He wanted it like nothing else. He wanted it like gold in his pockets, like endless Christmas, like a 1st grade love dream. "A cowboy," he muttered.

"What?" asked the rabbi.

"A cowboy."

"What? Speak up!"

"A cowboy!" Tony shouted, tears running down his cheeks.

"That's more like it! Pepperoni dick says he wants to be a cowboy. So, you got a girl with a nice little bod who loves to suck your big Italian bread stick, and you want to ride the range and rope buffalo or whatever those people do, those cowboys! There you go! Life ain't so bad, ain't it? Bring the cowboy here."

The Chinese and the Euro hippie lifted Tony up by his elbows and brought him over to the little Rabbi. The Rabbi placed his hands on both of his shoulders, squeezed, leaned in close and began to speak rapidly. Tony felt the little hands on his shoulders tense, smelled the rabbi's onion breath. The incomprehensible words washed over him pouring out from someplace deep, like an old kind of forgotten music released from a cave. All of a sudden Tony felt some kind of warmth spread down through his shoulders and flow through his entire body, and whatever was there, the thing that fed off him and slowly strangled the life out of him, dissolved. Then, the hippie opened the door and the Chinese shoved him out into the light. And now he was falling, falling through open space down onto a pile of old mattresses. Tony sprang up.

"You're so dumb your pants fall down!" chanted a little boy in the neighboring yard.

Tony ran down the street.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Sound My Hometown Makes



...Get back Jojo!
--John Lennon

I remember when I was a kid but wasn't. I was 21, home for a little while, back in that place that still resonates in my mind as a place of monkish solitude. As it turns out, everywhere since then has reflected that experience more or less, to varying degrees. Although there the experience seemed stark, as if I could live a million years and no one would ever find me.

And for as long as I was there, no one did.


That summer, I got a part time job in the Western Washington University mail room. Every morning at around 11 I rode my brother's old bike downtown past the big Horizon bank clock where as a kid I used to check the temperature, excited as the thermometer dropped and as things looked more and more like snow. The colder the better. My child self loved the cold.

My adolescent self craved the tropics.

And now my adult self again craves the cold.

I rode passed the little shops, the kids skateboarding in the little parking lot by the bus stop, up State street, passed the Y, passed the Food Co Op, up the steep, grated hills passed Nash hall, onto the university campus, through red square, passed the big iron statue, passed all the 60'ish university architecture, to the mail room where I began sorting.

And then, after making my deliveries in the delivery van, carrying the mail to various departments and dorms, I would coast all the way home, occasionally stopping at the 3-B to have a Newcastle and to read.

Once I met a girl there with whom I drank and played pool. Then we went to the Royal across the street where she ate what appeared to be a large, drunken meal of fettuccine Alfredo. She said the food there was good, although it looked like a lot to eat after 4 beers. I loaned her my book. I forgot what I was reading. Something serious, worth loaning in a way a serious reader loans a book.

Later, after the summer was over when I was about to return to college we met again so she could return the book whose title just evades my memory. The girl seemed significantly older if only due to the fact that she drank a lot and played pool and had a premature smoker's voice and seemed a part of the college life there where I had always watched the college students and even after taking some classes there, viewed them as much older than myself.


Bellingham lay right on Puget Sound anchored in the south by the Fairhaven fairy terminal, in the center by the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill, and in the North by the ambiguous industrial sector: a cement factory, a distant oil processing facility. And then inland, there were rolling hills that didn't seem to grow anything. There was just land and frosty tall grasses and evergreens stretching toward Mt. Baker, a mecca for ski bums who hitchhiked up their on the weekends.


People cut me, repulsed me, and the one's I wanted to get to know seemed utterly remote, intertwined with the hostile factions, the rebellious young men whose motives for doing what they did I absolutely didn't understand, who seemed part of one tremendous fashion statement that somehow set itself up as a way of life.



Driving into that landscape, my mother's skiing, smoking, architecture designing boyfriend behind the wheel of his Cherokee, I didn't see the beauty of that place. When does one start noticing the beauty of a landscape? I think for me it was when I had left all the pain behind after I left that place and found myself in a totally different landscape. And there, pre cut by everything, this new beauty cut me. It carved a huge gash into my soul which healed over like a tree's wound darkening my vision to everything that came after, spinning me around and around and then setting me loose into the labyrinth of early adulthood.



That's what the view of the Aegean was from the prow of a ship. Meanwhile, the people in Athens seemed totally different, immersed in cafe life, Vodka Lemones, sex and politics, intellectual-ness of a different order. Love seemed everywhere. The possibility was not utterly remote as it always felt in the Pacific Northwest. In Greece, it seemed like if I would have stayed long enough, I would have met a girl into being a girl, liking me in the unthinking, accepting way a girl likes a boy who doesn't know how to be other than how he is.



And so, coming home was like plunging back into this strange state of constant inadequacy, not being quite good enough. Return created a continuous link from my Californian childhood, the strife of growing up with parents whose egos were immeasurably larger than my own. An experience of the link with the past was in and of itself a stressful thing to feel. Although there was something else, something about the place itself, so relaxed, so intent on experiencing a condition of pureness, which was also stressful.

The people in my hometown seemed more than elsewhere intent on being pure, in terms of the things they ate, the clothing they wore. I heard them speak of going into the woods as an act of purification. They came out renewed. They spoke of their renewal, of their plans to baptize themselves again in the wilderness.

One year, I had a biology teacher who told us that she lived in a tepee. She lived in the tepee with her boyfriend. It seemed so odd. At 14, I didn't know what to think of it -- none of us did, and so we instinctively understood that something like that is best mocked rather than fully comprehended.

Although, looking back on it, I can almost fathom the weird series of ruptures and voids that led to her life in the tepee with her boyfriend, just as my own series of snakes and ladders has led to a life in Russia on the fringes of a profession.


I tried to avoid growing up for as long as possible perhaps because instinctively I knew it would be horrible. And the older I got, the more I filled out the shoes of my own solitude which was always somehow connected with the place itself which fed the odd germ in me which resulted in the odder plant. I fed off that place as a chia pet feeds off the sunlight in an inverse photo synthetic process producing an image's negative: the opposite of the home grown, organic, dirt fed native. I was a fraud, a secret Californian, an crypto Jew/Bostonian or else something, I'm not sure what.

"Are you from Boston?" I was often asked by the incomprehensible bumpkins of that ville. I had never been to Boston and still have not.

Going away felt like stepping out of that binding set of untraceable cultural signifiers that make a solitary a solitary. First Greece, then Eastern Europe, then Spain. I conceived of making travel into a kind of life. Elsewhere, I did not feel like an outcast. People noticed me, took interest in me even.

At first I thought they took interest in me just because I was a foreigner. But I am not so sure anymore. I was 19, 20. I must have been just like any young person of that age, worthy of contact. Only back home, I could never adapt to the elaborate cultural signifiers. I wasn't a part of a fraternity. I was a nerd, a blank. I wasn't even that. I was a map maker, a bag pipe player, a myth reader, an atavism, a slip of the collective unconscious. Alchemically, I was enmeshed within a different dimension and so could not fully participate in this one.

I think my undesirability was less felt by foreigners who did not understand that my hairstyle and clothing weren't hip, didn't care that I didn't snowboard or hike, weren't looking for pick up lines, but through the miserable European centuries, had come to appreciate my own brand of oblivious, open-faced interest. And so while I was probably noticed for my nationality, I must have been at least somewhat accepted for the fact that others weren't as aware of my unacceptability and thus must have noticed some of the creature that lay beneath all that American-bread misery.

I met a girl. I went to visit her where she lived on the Canaries. We rented a car and stopped to swim at every beach. We ate shrimps and calamaris in roadside cafes, and then I convinced myself that I had to return. The whole thing happened blindingly fast. I traced my way back in dreams, but somehow that wasn't good enough.



The sound of my hometown is the distant sound of the Georgia Pacific factory on an early December morning when the grass is frosty and your dog's finger nails skate along the icy sidewalk as you throw papers on front porches and look up at the stars dangling above the church steeple with your American religiosity intact contemplating the onset of the Christmas season and the holiness of winter which is the holiness of your own lost childhood, which is perhaps the holiness of humanity's lost Ithaca.

Those early mornings were some of the most beautiful mornings of my late childhood, when everyone was still asleep, when the people were all concealed. The human world drawn back like a curtain, something deeper revealed. An internal state of a universe brimming over with God. Not love. What was that? Love was contact. Love was something so far out of reach you did not even want to think about it. This was the eternal, the immediate unknown, and so on those early mornings you were all you and even a little less than you, a part of yourself lost within a distant star field.



The summer I returned to deliver the mail was not the summer of the Canary girl which seemed to breed 2 years of misery and longing which drove me nearly insane as I sought to replicate the simplicity of that encounter with college girls who expected in me some sort of simulacrum they heard about from somewhere; or else, in that fine-tuned economic way Americans have of spotting a wooden nickel, they knew from the start that I didn't quite belong.

Thankfully, that summer I returned to the mail room was only after Greece and so coming back was almost like re entering the meditative state of my childhood if I could forget the stress of linkages and the stresses of that human world which seemed at once incipiently relaxed and ideological.

On the way back from the mail room, I stopped in at Henderson's bookstore. The owner Robert was a taciturn man from elsewhere who, along with his girlfriend/companion/wife, loved Bellingham's natural looks and hated people in general. He especially hated Michael, the guy who owned "Michael's Books" across the street, who evaded his taxes and later became a Christian fundamentalist tombstone carver. I browsed the titles I always browsed then, Baudelaire, Kafka, Boll, Italo Calvino.

"What is it about guys who like Italo Calvino," said a blind woman 10 years later.

She was a beautiful blind woman who I met out in front of a Brooklyn cafe with her dog.

I didn't tell her that I had been one of those Italo Calvino readers, although I only really read the Baron in the Trees because long ago, in his desolate, divorcee flat in San Francisco, my father had mentioned the title.

I read the titles my father read, adopted the literary tastes of my father, but I also discovered other things like Irish and Welsh myths, the Mabinogian, the Icelandic sagas, Nikos Kazantzakis, Knut Hamson and Herman Hesse,. I read the entirety of Herodotus and even read about 200 pages of the Kalevala about those human Finnish gods occupying their various marshes way up north.

Later, after sifting through required readings no one likes but all pretentious people verse themselves in: Ezra Pound, Virginia Wolff, James Joyce -- I can't even begin to put forward a list of the books I read in class as a literature major simply because they were so god awful I couldn't read them thoroughly -- I gradually found my way back to imaginative writing in the form of Borges, Haruki Murakami, Celine, Orson Scott Card, W.G. Sebald who died tragically at the height of his powers.

Looking back on the sexy cafe life of Greece, I can't imagine having read these things growing up an Athenian, a beautiful Athenian girl in tow, my life neatly planned and satisfied containing other miseries I don't understand.

I can't imagine anyone reading the Kalevala who also drinks Vodka Lemones and sits in the Kolonaki whispering sweet nothing to a spandex-clad dark-haired politically-activated beauty. I can't imagine someone who knows what the Kalevala is, who isn't Finnish, being even faintly intelligible in any sense. To discover something like the Kalevala, on your own, at 15, you have to be nearly totally on the outskirts of society with a huge used bookstore on hand, and I can't recall seeing any huge used bookstores in the Balkans or in Russia for that matter. Although, I remember some in Krakow, which further delineates in my mind the marker which divides true authoritarian and post-authoritarian cultures from the rest of the world. Used bookstores. Bookstores in airports. People reading in public. Dictators turn reading into an idolatrous grind. Although Greece in many ways straddled that divide and was in any event a place I learned little about.



After getting my Newcastle, I would perhaps ride over the Stuarts coffee house where they had the poetry reading MC'd by Bob who dated all the girls in town. On one occasion I met a girl at Stuarts. I began to talk to her, heartened by my time away, heartened by my sense of having been someone else. We spoke of Greece. She said she wanted to go. I told her I had photos and offered to meet her the following day.

The next day after delivering the mail, I came equipped with the photos. She was in a hurry and so thanked me and departed. I wondered if she just came to honor her obligation. Later, I saw her on her scooter, a young man riding along back. For some reason, I still remember the young man, his black hair, yellow shirt, brown shorts, hiking boots. A wild child of nature. I was not a wild child of nature. I was a medieval child of forgotten 80's movie.



"You're scaring me," Miriam said.

We had camped out on a beach. Africa lay somewhere out over the water. I had crawled out of the tent to look at the panorama.

"Just, quiet, for a second," I said, overwhelmed by a feeling of perfection, that I was dong the exact right thing, the exact thing God intended I do which was camp out on a beach with Miriam Suarez on the Canary Islands. The sensation was overwhelming.

It was like a spore of that old place, that old solitary Christmas within my heart lingered. I was an unmellowed wine. And so instead of letting that moment pass over me like a civilized person, I momentarily divorced myself from the fellow creature who had helped bring it on in order to relish it like a desert saint, like a madman, like a Steppenwolf.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Later, she walked down to wash her hair in the ocean.

I was still whole then. The return wrecked me, as did the subsequent departures, farther and farther into the unknown, Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasaus, trying to recapture an experience that was not totally produced out of being a stranger in a strange land, but just from being 22, innocent, as worthwhile as any other 22 year old, not into sports, not particularly handsome or tall, but not ugly either, with things to offer.

I didn't know how to hold onto those moments. And the tawdriness of everything which came after still teaches me lessons if I am lucky.



I wonder why now the idea of a tropical landscape stresses me in a way that the landscape of my hometown doesn't. I currently have no desire for a Spanish beach, a Greek island. I want to be someplace where it's cold in the winter, where the frost blankets the grass in the autumn, where the leaves fall and where everything goes to sleep. Maybe Finland, like in the Kalevala, with the fir trees so green they're blue, the snow clinging to the branches in huge clumps and the dawn exploding with coldness, silencing the human world; where the stars hang over church steeples in empty, Dylan Thomas-singing streets.

No more desire for Greece: even for the Island of Hydra where Leonard Cohen went to live and where he met Marianne which gave birth to the song I wanted to listen to as I sailed across the Caspian Sea, as I trained across Siberia. No more desire for that Spanish island: just an ingrained knowledge of that place where she still lives lost to me with another who knows how to hold onto what is important.

I want to freeze in Siberia, to visit Freuchen land in Greenland, to live with the Sami, the Inuit.



I still on occasion return to that home that was never really a home but was as inhospitable and odd as a mechanically designated asteroid, an MX-37, and every time I return I feel the same feelings. Every time I return, I see the same people. I don't know these people. Perhaps once I was one of them making the rounds in Bellingham, from the coffee shop to the bookstore to the water's edge. We never found each other. Maybe if I had stayed, we would have, or else I would have grown into a solitude equivalently deep, in a way deeper than St. Joseph's hallucinatory desert realm of the spirit, and then it wouldn't have mattered.

There was that tall guy with the big glasses and ginger hair parted on the side. He wore his pants hiked high. I always saw him walking down by Michaels books where I think he might have worked, although I couldn't be sure.

There was the girl who walked everywhere. She was once small, but with all the walking grew bigger and bigger until she had massive, walkers thighs. She strode everywhere, downtown, all the way across town to the ferry terminal which sent ferries to Juno. Sometimes, I saw her out by the mall, having traversed Cornwall Park, striding through the inhospitable strip where nary a pedestrian tread.

There was the lonesome Michael Jackson impersonator, moonwalking on State Street.

There was Uncle Frank (the fake uncle of a friend) whom I always saw in cafes and who, as I aged, began to awkwardly ignore my presence, although this was a common practice among Bellingham residents, and I could count on being ignored by a variety of acquaintances. I think everyone could.

There was Bob the poetry MC who always kind of mocked me and who, as if by way of apology, had tattooed in large green lettering the words "Forgive Me" on the inside of his arm.

There were the ultra hip video store clerks who looked like characters from old Velvet Underground videos who acted like you were insane for talking with them about the movies you watched.

There was that guy who used to live across the street from us who practiced yoga in Broadway park and who had a correspondingly gentile yoga voice. One day as we played basketball in the street at dusk, he came out onto his balcony and shouted at us something along the lines of, "Shut up! My mother is sleeping!" I always saw him in coffee shops reading the paper.

There was the lady who as a 15 year old I occasionally chatted with in Henderson's bookstore. We once spoke of Sir Walter Scott. She was on a Scott kick. She spoke enthusiastically of the Waverly Novels. She had a pretty, bookish quality and I wondered if I were a bit older if there might not have been a spark. Years later, I saw her at Village Books in Fairhaven. She said she worked there for the discount. She was a great lover of books! And then, at last she was a person whom I saw muttering to herself in a coffee shop. Maybe she was having a bad day, and god knows I have been that same solitary coffee shop mutterer! But it was also as if she had grown so distant from the world, now in her 40's, she only had herself for company. I remember there was something cruel in me which kept me from reaching out to her, broaching her silence, reminding her of the day when she spoke enthusiastically of Sir Walter Scott.

I wonder what pain rips people from the rout toward love which at a certain point seems so blisteringly apparent! I wonder what strange, religious spirit drives people into a confusion so deep and a solitude so resounding it is beyond the solitude of the monk and the hermit because it is invisible and unacknowledged and unassisted and untended by the tender hands of supplicants!

As I write, I begin to remember. It's as if, at 33, I am picking up the pieces, remembering like a broken stick about when it was a part of a tree. I wonder if there is a way to grow back into that edifice of wholeness?



That summer when I returned to deliver the mail, I saw someone else I hadn't seen in years and never saw again. I saw Celeste the Tepee woman. She was at the Food Co Op. I don't know why I had stopped at The Food Co Op. It smelled like all health food stores smell. I think there was something about that smell, something which strikes some people as vaguely unwholesome but others as some kind of rallying cry, to join a band of brothers, to radically alter until all the vestiges of the old self die out and something new is born.

She stood before a bin of cashews. I said I remembered her from the old days. I found her voice as insincerely ebullient as I had found it years ago. She must have been just as old as I am now.



I am grateful that I have not wasted my youth in a tepee, but I wish I could go back to reconstruct myself as I was on the Canaries to not feel so much like I am dying.

I wonder if there's a way back, if I can sit here for long enough capturing all those moments and thereby regain my soul?

I remember the inbound flight, arriving in Las Palmas, Miriam awaiting me in the airport. I remember throwing my crab net into Bellingham bay, the way the line felt slick with sea water. I remember her skin so dark on her back there were patches of pink, I remember the way the sea air smelled on days the smoke from Georgia Pacific was blowing out; I remember her fearlessly kicking at bees that had hived in her phone booth, she as she was, complete, abundant, someone who I could never imagine wanting me yet somehow did; I remember Christmas Eve trying to believe in God but in the end trying to find something sublime in the attempt; I remember the way she cried when I left, the way I felt like I could return to the United States and be something more than what America saw in me.

Everything totally unrelated to these memories and the act of writing them down, my ambitions, my professional pursuits, is impure.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

An Ugly Man



At 28, it hit him like a ton of bricks. "I am an ugly man." He never fully allowed himself to realize it before. Perhaps his doting parents should have been more honest with him, should have guided him along more reasonable channels in proportion to his bad looks.

The moment of enlightenment came one evening at De Lucas. He was having a drink with his friend Mike who was the quintessential handsome man. He had gone to the bathroom. Kind of a roman type space, with water trickling, opera playing, mirrors everywhere. In an instant, he caught a glimpse of himself from all angles, his stooped posture, his frizzy red hair, his reddish fat-yet-narrow face, blond eyebrows set low over close set, tiny blue eyes. "Shit, I'm ugly," he thought. "This is why I've been unsuccessful as both an actor and a waiter."

"I'm an ugly man," he said, his voice echoing off the tiles of the bathroom. Even his voice sounded ugly.

Back in the restaurant, he saw Mike at the bar. All of a sudden, he was filled with apprehension. Why did he spend so much time with Mike? Often when he was with Mike, they met women. The women were of course totally consumed by Mike. Was that why he and Mike hung out so much? Was there the germ of some sort of reasonableness there?

Mike was intelligent, talented. He wrote a screenplay which he sold for 250,000 dollars. The name of the screenplay was Proteus Nine. It was science fiction, incredibly creative, engaging. They inked Jean Claude Van Damme which kind of doomed the whole thing from the start. Still, Mike made a bunch of money.

On the other hand, he had never managed to complete one of his screenplays. Since moving to LA, he had only been an extra. You can make a living at being an extra. As an extra he was used chiefly as padding for crowds, mobs, busy city sequences, concerts, etc. He wasn't one of those extras you wanted walking across the street, oblivious to the lead role passing in the opposite direction.

He was listening to Mike talk.

"I'm just an ugly guy," he said.

Mike paused. "Like Paul Giamanti?"

"Paul Giamanti's not ugly," he said. "He's got that teddy bear look. Tiny chin, big eyes that kind of plead with you..."

"Come on, you aren't ugly. There are a lot of guys who look like you. Just look around."

They looked around the room. It was as if every man in the room was stunningly attractive.

"Look at these guys," said the ugly 28-year-old. "Are they all body builders or something?"

"You do have a point," said Mike.

"Chiseled features. Look at their shirt sleeves. Their biceps fill out their sleeves," he said, holding onto his own lank sleeve. "Look at their women. It's as if for every totally average woman, there's this 6 foot stud," he said.

"You do have a point," said Mike.

"What kind of woman could possibly want me?"

"I don't know," said Mike. "I don't know."

***

He slid down off his bar stool to the floor, all 5 feet 7 inches of him sliding down.

That was the end of his friendship with Mike. Sometimes certain relationships don't survive transitions. It was as if a spell had been broken: the spell of his own self-illusion. He would no longer let himself be the sore thumb at De Lucas. He would go elsewhere. Maybe to Rippers, that bar full of those intellectual punks.

It was night. He walked down Sunset Blvd, passed the huge Hustler shop. He went in. He browsed the pornos, looking at the other men browsing the pornos. All like him, strung out on their own ugliness.

Jesus! What it means to be an ugly man! He thought. Your entire destiny is governed by your ugliness! He left the Hustler shop, a shiver running down his spine. He stopped in at a liquor store and bought a fifth of Bim Black from the Korean guy.

He made the turn onto his own street, walking up the silent little block toward the hills.

***

He entered the little door embedded at ground level in the bottom of the duplex. His flat was little more than a kitchenette, smaller than a studio. Everything was in one room. "Ok, I get it," he thought. "Ugly man, ugly living space."

He poured some whiskey into a coffee mug and sat at the rickety little plywood table.

"I have to get out of show business."

The whole point of show business was that you had to be appealing somehow. Even your archetypal ugly men, Wally Sean, Woody Allen, George Costanza, were deeply appealing. Yet, there was nothing appealing about him. He was neither pleasantly plump, nor downright silly. He got up, went over to the kitchen sink, looked in the mirror. His face had a disturbing quality.

Often, over the course of his life, people read in him some emotional disturbance that wasn't there at the time. His face was troublesomely ugly. It got to people on a level, made them feel like something was wrong. It exposed them. No one wants that sort of thing.

Ugliness should be opaque, like a brick wall. You can hammer on that ugliness all day long and it will take your blows because it's a strong, supportive kind of ugliness. His own ugliness was brittle, threatened to splinter at the touch.

***

He got out pen and paper and began to make a list of jobs.

Janitor. Janitors were notoriously repulsive. Not just ugly, but creepy ugly: his kind of ugly. Computer programmer's had a kind of geek chic: were actually beautiful people who didn't realize they were beautiful. Air conditioning repair man was more like it. Cable guy. All these jobs were in reach. Ugly men made a living at these jobs. They made a living enough to afford a ticket to where they could find a bride that would accept them because of their money. They could go and find a women totally worn out by poverty, willing to accept ugliness as an occupational, gold-digging hazard.

He realized that his problem all these years had come from trying to have the life of a handsome, talented man like Mike. He shuddered at the thought of Mike. What had Mike wanted out of that relationship? Maybe out of some deep seeded incomprehensible insecurity, Mike needed an ugly foil to go around with as a constant reminder of his own beauty.

***

"Ever think of settling down and having children?" his mother asked him the following day.

This seemed like a good moment to break the news. "You can't have children without first having a girlfriend."

"I guess someday you'll decide that you might like to have children," his mother said.

The big difference between his experience his mothers was that companionship was not a choice for him. It was not something offered to him from out of a range of choices. It was not within his life's lexicon of trajectories, which primarily consisted of toward and away from homelessness.

"I guess so," he said, not knowing what to say.

His mother and father were handsome people. He often observed that handsome people produced ugly children.

Working on the margins of the celebrity world, he had observed that beautiful celebrity parents usually gave birth to ugly children. Take Jake and Mercedes McCoy. Their kids Tyler and Jessica were down rights beasts. They were so ugly they were like genetic anomalies, although they seemed quite happy. They were the children of beautiful celebrities. They had boyfriends and girlfriends. The boyfriends and girlfriends were unsuccessful musicians or unknown models. They came to visit on the set.

When you were the children of celebrity you married better looking but poor wanna-be celebrities or celebrity bar tenders.

***

Gradually, as reality sunk in, he began to sense a new wisdom come upon him. It was the wisdom that comes from trying to be one thing all your life only to discover that you are not that thing and will never be.

He thought about his former state. Everyone in that former state seemed like a narcissist. Had he assisted their narcissism? Maybe they were all a bunch of narcissists because they were just really good looking. That was only one of the many ashen learnings he wrote down in a notebook.

"Handsome people love themselves because they are loved."

***

The Ugly 28-year-old, continued to work as an extra, although he stopped trying to stand out. He graciously accepted his role as human background bulk. He managed to hang on to just enough day shifts at The Grill to make rent. He became quiet. His co-workers troubled him by what he now perceived as the constant narcissistic entitlement they projected. He discovered that those who did talk to him continued to do so with our without his input. They weren't really speaking with him: they were simply speaking, to the air, to the room at large. The only things they ever had to say were about themselves, their own lives, their pursuits. Had it always been like this? He had never noticed before.

In the evening, he rode the bus down to the community college. Now the bus: now that was the ugly man's natural environment! Everyone on the bus was either seriously ugly or deranged or mentally retarded. The mentally retarded had it easy, he thought. There was something angelic about the retarded men and women who rode the city bus in LA. It was as if God had spared them from the burden of differentiating themselves from society and coming to grips with their own oddity. They seemed brimming over with acceptance, like saints.

Sometimes, you couldn't quite peg the mental capacity of the bus riders. It was occasionally hard for him to delineate between the insane, the ugly, or the saintly retarded. Being cross-eyed did not necessarily indicate a lack of capacity, nor did tourettes syndrome make for a totally unpleasant companion. In fact, some of the most delightful passengers were those who rattled off lists at random, did intricate calculations, or announced out loud the objects of their interest...'there's a Maxima. Another Maxima. Another Maxima..." said the Asbergers guy obsessed with Nissan Maximas.

Riding the bus in LA was an experience reserved for the ugly, the critically obese, and the insane, as was standing around for hours on desolate, scorched strips waiting for the bus to arrive. There was no flirtation. The only speech came in the form of unbidden, random babble as if dialed in from Proteus Nine.

Before bed at night, he wrote in his book. "It's not that people don't reach out to other people: it's that they don't reach out to me." It was a grim epiphany, but he felt comforted by it all the same. It meant that it wasn't his fault, that all the advice Mike and his mother had given him over the years was total bullshit.

Then he wrote, "It matters less what you do and more who you are."

The words seemed true. He shed a tear and then fell into a deep, unruffled sleep.

Since his epiphany in the De Lucas' restroom, his sleep had improved.

***

He rode the bus down to Contra Costa Community College planted like an alien colonizer on a strip of blasted earth. The landscaping consisted of dirt and ripped, plastic garbage bag material anchored in the dirt, come loose in areas, flapping in the wind, not a thing living. The skeletons of shrubs scraped up against stucco walls. Inside the building, he saw many ugly people like himself with that brittle, critical mass kind of untouchable ugliness. Big glasses, narrow shoulders, heads too tiny, too big, frail, obese, pasty, hairy, squat, gangly, mutated, blank, transparent, mottled, dripping.

Contra Costa Community College was only for the ugly and Mexicans, although the two groups didn't mix as he learned over the 6 months of his air conditioning repair course.

That's where he met Daniel and Maria, an ugly couple from Orange County who had moved to the city because they wanted to design sets.

"We discovered that it's impossible to break into that market!" said Maria.

"Impossible," affirmed Daniel.

They were at Daniel and Maria's place. Their place was basically like his own place, but times two. Like him, they lived in the lower, sunken level of a duplex. All their furniture was old and worn. Although they were large, their clothing was larger. Daniel's hemispheral jeans were continually sliding down, reavealing his butt crack. Maria's tremendous blouse hung low, revealing her pendulous breasts. They were eating some kind of repulsive barley stir fry.

"So, when did you realize it?"

Daniel and Maria looked at each other. "Realize what?"

"That, you, you know, I mean, that you don't really look...like...show business people."

"You mean that were ugly?" Daniel began to laugh loud and uncouth, throwing back his head, revealing his dark brown nasal bushes. Man! was he ugly.

"We've always known," said Daniel.

"How do you cope with it, I mean, doesn't it bother you?"

"We see each other's inner beauty," said Maria who was in every way Daniel's equal in terms of ugliness. She looked god awful.

He sat clutching his mug of Yeager Meister. Yeager Meister was certainly the ugliest of alcohols. He wondered if he would someday learn to see inner beauty.

"When did you realize?" Maria asked.

"About 4 months ago."

"That's interesting, isn't it? Some people always know while others find out," said Maria.

"Not everyone knows!" said Daniel. "It's easier if you always know, don't you think?"

"Definitely," said Maria. "If we have ugly children, we're just going to tell them."

"You're going to tell your kids they're ugly?"

"Definitely," said Maria. "After they reach a certain age. But I don't think they will be ugly," she said, smiling at Daniel who raised her hand to his lips.


***

Everyday he got out of bed, looked himself in the mirror and thought, "Everywhere people are falling in love with each other, reaching out to each other."

This somehow made everything easier to bear. It made life seem sane and comprehensible, softened the impact. Everywhere people are falling in love...

He was approaching the end of his air conditioning repair course. Through Daniel and Maria, he met others like him who possessed a fragile, threatening ugliness. Like Erik, the comic book artist from Vermont.

"I just don't make personal appearances," said Erik. "It's bad for sales."

They sat around his table, drinking Bim Black, watching the light fade. They had no desire to go anywhere because they knew that doing so would be absolutely pointless.

"Sometimes they want to meet me. They send me letters, even with photographs. Sometimes naked photographs, really actually quite attractive women. Before I realized what the problem was, I used to send autographed head shots in return. That's the last I would hear from them. Once someone wrote back telling me that they had changed their mind, that I wasn't the man for them after all. It was very odd. You could tell that she was disappointed by the head shot, but she wanted to preserve my feelings and so she came up with all this bullshit, like now wasn't the right time in her life, like she wasn't ready for commitment and wanted to devote herself to her career. Totally crazy shit. All I wrote was my number and look me up next time you're in LA. You could tell she had constructed some elaborate fantasy around me."

Erik suddenly began to laugh, a kind of spastic, convulsion beginning at his diaphragm, rolling up through his esophagus releasing a hollow, machine gun like, ehehehehehehe.

"Now, I just have fun with it, send them random clippings from National Geographic, pictures of elephants and stuff, with a note, like 'what do you think of this?' just to see what their response will be. This one writes, 'ooh, I like animals too!' It really gives you a weird glimpse of what life must be like for attractive people, like it doesn't matter what you say, like you could just say, duh, blu blu blu, and people would be like, oh, that's so fascinating!"

He thought of the Nissan Maxima guy. "There's a Maxima! There's a Maxima!"

He met Dwight Bode, one of the first people he had seen at Contra Costa Community. How could you miss him? Dwight Bode was 7 feet tall. He was a giant with long, noodly arms, ginger hair neatly parted on the side, incredibly thick glasses with an Andrey the Giant voice. But his most repulsive feature was his face by far, planted close together right in the middle of his head. The eyes, the nose, the mouth: it was as if you could cover them all beneath a coffee mug. It was like he didn't have a face: only glasses.

Dwight Bode was a really nice guy, but really, really gloomy. When he drank Bim Black, he wasn't funny and chatty like Erik. He became reckless, smashing a glass in a moment of insane, bi-polar glee, looming there, hunched beneath the ceiling breathing hard. "I just don't know what to do anymore," he said, looking at this hands. "It's so...crippling," he fell to his knees.

Some of his finest memories from that time came from his walks with a sober Dwight Bode in the hills around LA. They sat watching the star come out each beyond the need to try to summit the indescribable with paltry language.

***

He let his extra jobs dry up. Without hustling, he discovered that his day shifts at The Grill were slowly granted to other actor-waiters. This allowed for a smooth transition into the life of an air-conditioning repair man.

He kind of let himself go physically, filling out his ugliness, becoming less like Erik and more like Daniel. Being 30 pounds over weight made sense. His hair began to fall out. He shaved his head. Since becoming fat and bald, he noticed that on occasion total strangers had a word or two for him. They didn't say a whole lot, just commented on the weather, on current events. It was kind of nice. It was as if he was morphing from a state of fragile ugliness to durable ugliness: transforming from something disruptive to something intelligible.

He began to save money. Suddenly, he found himself making 60 thousand a year, which was for him an absolute fortune.

Since he never went out in the evening and didn't need to think about renting a nice place, he saved approximately 30 thousand dollars the first year after taxes. He had a bank roll now and he felt like the world was his oyster.

Since that moment of epiphany in the De Lucas toilets, he had learned and accepted the world's terms and conditions. He had learned of his limitations. Most importantly, he had learned that everywhere, people were falling in love, just not with him. Still, despite his own singularity, the world revolved on the axis of love.

***

Three years later, having saved up approximately 80 thousand dollars, he bought a ticket to Japan. He wasn't particularly seeking love: he just didn't know what to do with himself and thought that in Asia things were more possible and that he might as well go there if only for the food.

He spent several weeks in Tokyo, going out in the evening, talking to no one, reading a Japanese novel written in the 1960s about the ghost of a traveling salesman who comes back to live with his widowed wife who, having re married, doesn't want anything to do with the pesky ghost.

The novel reminded him of Japan in general.

From Japan, he traveled to Korea, and from Korea he flew to Thailand. The Thai ex patriot scene repulsed him. It was as if ugly men from around the world traveled their to inflict themselves on beautiful, young girls who, out of sheer poverty, were ready to embrace any form of ugliness, be it disruptive or obdurate, creepy or hilarious, radioactive or inert. They would accept anyone as long as they had money.

Yet, even there he felt indescribably distant from the possibility of connection. Walking Bangkok's lurid streets, he began to think that the problem was really beneath the surface. There was something beyond gross looks that kept him from contact. Unlike with Daniel and Maria, he possessed a kind of internal ugliness.

***

Several weeks later, his rusty, iron junk bound for the Andaman Islands sprung a leak. He had been told that this kind of thing happens all the time in those waters. When he heard the crewmen shouting, he could hardly believe that it had happened to him. But it had. His ship was sinking.

"They go straight to the bottom," said some ugly white guy in a Hawaii shirt, a beautiful girl on his lap. "Plish, glug, glug, glug," he blithely mimed the act of a ship sinking. The mostly naked teen laughed.

The encounter made him desire all the more a long trip on a Thai rust bucket. So, the following morning he paid the 60 or so dollars and gathered his stray belongings.

He sprang out of his cabin and into the light. The water was already frothing over the edges. The captain chattered frantically over radio, but it was happening so quickly and they were miles from land. Soon, they were bobbing in the blue-green sea. There were 8 of them, but only 4 life jackets which the senior crew quickly snatched up. A shark attacked the captain who had been one of the first to snatch up a life jacket and leap overboard straight from the bridge. They all watched the attack. He felt no fear as the captain's eyes closed and as blood bubbled from his lips.

Another member of the crew, one without a life jacket, suddenly began to struggle. He went under. He came back up. He tried to cling to one of his crew mates who pushed him away. He tried to cling to the ugly 28-year-old. They went under together. Beneath the waves in full view of the sharks, he struggled to free himself from the sinking Thai sailor. Finally, with his last breath he kicked away, rising slowly, barely reaching the surface without passing out. The remaining six were in hysterics as the hammerheads circled. Sharks picked off two more during the night. Another sank.

He was amazingly calm. He floated on his back beneath the starlight, his fat belly well-above the waves. The sharks were on his mind all the time, but he learned to compartmentalize that anxiety and to live with it as a friend. He never new that outside of being ugly, he was also courageous. After being rescued 27 hours later, sitting on the edge of the bunk, he said the words:

"I'm an ugly, courageous son of a bitch."

Then, in a moment of celebration, he walked over to the sink and smashed the mirror with his fist. Later that week he got a hammerhead shark tattoo on the inside of his right forearm.

When he returned to Los Angeles several months later, he discovered his old notebook. Upon reading the epiphanies contained therein, he realized how much he had changed. For one thing, he was no longer the sort of person who tries to understand why life is as it is. At least he thought so. At least he wanted it to be so.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Evening Of His Dream



(An Homage to Borges)

Fernando De Los Tresas dreamed of heaven like a game show he knew existed or at least was once popular long ago but which he never watched himself. He dreamed of himself bemused by the show's triteness:, the three curtains displayed by a seductive blond, the middle one rolling aside revealing a goat, much to the audience's delight. That jeering delight was all he knew within the moment of his dream's moment. He awoke already sweating with the midmorning heat.

He took his waking easy as recommended by an American poet, first opening his eyes, focusing on a long crack running slantwise from the wall to the broken ceilling fan which hung in the middle of the room, more an ornament completing the room itself than something useful.

At 67 years old he at last allowed himself the luxury of waking easy and taking his time, getting out of bed at last, going to the kitchen to prepare his morning matee, thumbing through the worn complete Poe he always left on the empty breadbox.

As he sat at his tiny, circular kitchen table in a sunbeam that had navigated its way down through the canyon between his building and the neighboring building, he recalled more of his dream. It had not ended abruptly with the idiotic game show heaven. There had been a totally different aspect to that satirical dream paradise produced by his sleeping mind: an endless junkyard, a kind of lost realm. The garbage-strewn waste stretched on and on. And there he had found his love.

The shock of recall made him take pause. She had the somewhat overblown name of Esmerelda De Flores and she was a dark-haired beauty with lips perhaps too big to accomodate her unusually small nose. Her job was to collect roses which were displayed on ancient packaging materials that had yet to decay into the post-apocalyptic trash heap.

Suddenly Fernando De Los Tresas groaned with longing for the love that had been denied him throughout his life. At first he resolved to drink. In his mind he selected a bottle of American whiskey with an unusual name, not Jack, not Jim, but Bim: Bim Black, although he knew that no such whiskey existed. Yet he would drink Bim Black. Then he took up paper and pen trying to describe his dream, first the game show and then the woman.

As if suddenly, totally depleted by the act of recording his memories, he lay his head on the table and slept, rising soon after to regain his bed where he awoke in the early evening to the sound of construction in the street.

***

"There is something behind the little theater that is hard to describe," said Armondo Silva, the dentist whose offices were directly beneath De Los Tresas's apartment. "I don't know why I have forgotten about it for so long."

He was not a friend per se, but rather a constant presence: someone who over the years you learn a lot about through sheer proximity but whose company you don't consciously seek. So De Los Tresa's felt he practically had a lover's knoweldge of Armondo Silva whom he met in the street on the evening of his dream.

"I had an amazing dream!" said De Los Tresas. "I had a love dream, after so many years."

But Armondo Silva paused, looking at De Los Tresas with a mixture of pity and confusion. De Los Tresas continued. "I think her name was...Babancha," he said, chuckling at the strange invented name, for he could no longer remember the name of the woman in his dream.

***

Aside from random, drunken encounters and cheap prostitutes, De Los Tresas's life had been largely untouched by women. All his dabblings were rare and painful, punctuated by the evening light sliding across dirty, unfamiliar walls, the sensation of absence, the requirement of solitiude. Most of these experiences left him feeling like taking a long journey to a place where people seldom went: not because he wanted to escape, but just because a journey seemed a logical conclusion, like a death or invasion.

Now, at 67 years old, he felt that familiar sense of longing for departure. He said goodbye to Armando Silva and began to pace the streets of Beunos Aires, the city he where he had lived all his life. Unconsciously, he began to navigate towards the little theater. "Something happens there," Armando Silva had said. "I'm beginning to remember everything."

In his mind, De Los Tresas connected the little theater with one of his earliest romantic experiences. Although it was not the little theater, but the arcade beyond where the statues were, the horseman, the jester, where it had all happened. And so, instead of taking one of his familiar routs, he told himself he wanted to revisit the statues which he had seen many times before without giving them a second thought.

He often passed the little theater, recalling the girl he had met years before whose memory still chased him. He had been 19, she somewhat younger. He had given her a bottle of wine. They had done virtually nothing and yet the encounter presided over his life, as if it was his life's one real moment. The beads of sweat on her upper lip, the sense of her bodies heat, her dull brown hair. He could remember every single detail, and even today he could recall the clean smell of her brown, flower-print dress. Even today he begged time and myth to return him to that moment so he could say the proper things to magically capture her and keep her from slipping away.

And so, all of a sudden, as if his waking mind and sleeping mind conspired with each other, De Los Tressas thought he had a craving for the company of statues.

Passing the new gaudy fast food restaraunt, through the brief stand of grecian columnes abutting the theater, he at last entered into silence. Beyond, was nothing but construction and starlit sky, and the old statues of the little theater: the horseman, the jester, the fat civil cervant, the lady with the accordion, and others. They seemed so full of feeling that De Los Tresas felt that he had made one huge mistake by not living fully in myth. Although the point of rupture and rebirth seemed to be one in the same.

He scanned the area for his lost beloved who by now must have been plump and wrinkled but whom he would accept irregardless. He swore an oath of acceptance. But instead of summoning her, Armando Silva stepped from behind the statue of the coach

"So, you have come," he said.

"Yes, I have come," said De Los Tresas.

"Then, let me remind you why I have lived so close to you all these years," said Armondo Silva walking off into the construction site which opened up onto a terrain at once alien and familiar.

De Los Tresas followed Silva through the night, navigating around mammoth, jutting pylons and toppled columns. In the distance he began to make out fires. There were people living here.

As if reading his mind, Silva said, "Refugees."

"From what?" replied De Los Tresas.

"From the devestation of the world," said Silva. "Don't you remember? It was in fact you who so many years ago showed me how to live in illusion. But now, as old men it seems that we have grown tired of lies and have together returned to the natural state of desolation."

And there by one of the random fires scattered throughout the endless pile, Fernando De Los Tresas thought he saw his belovid's face.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Anatomy of the Satanic: Reflections on the release of HRW's torture report



Last week, Human Rights Watch released its report "Getting Away With Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees."

Here is the report: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture-0



Many, if not most of the culprits mentioned in HRW's Getting Away With Torture The Bush Administration and the Mistreatment of Detainees, are devout Christians. Bush's faith is well documented. John Ashcroft, Bush's attorney general, was a devout 7th Day Adventist. The attorney general who proceeded him was a devout Catholic. Virtually everyone in his circle advertised their beliefs.

Aside from believing in the God of the Poor, together they believed that through warfare, they could politically reconstitute the Middle East along democratic lines while reaping the economic fruits.

Satanism is variously defined and represented in history, practice, myth and literature. Generally, as least in relationship to its most well-known set of narratives, symbols, and legends, it constitutes an inversion of Christian beliefs, a rebellious corruption of New Testament injunctions toward love, personal sacrifice, non-violence which are also contained within other world religions, Islam, Taoism, Communism, Richard Dawkins, etc.

While satanists represented historically include those having 'made contracts with the devil,' having, like Goethe's Dr. Faustus, 'sold their souls,' on an abstract, narratival level, the satanic is a corruption, a subtle inversion which goes unrecognized until it is suddenly exposed a lie, a fatal flaw: Bernie Madoff's blind spot.

Accordingly Lucifer himself (The Prince of Darkness, i.e., prince of nothingness, negation, absence), is represented in myth as a contradiction. He is at once a creature of light and darkness. A creature of Godly aims: yet his aims are paradoxical, self-negating, corrupted.

But observe, this inversion is produced subtly: created within a moment of shift in which we realize a creature of light, the angelic 'morning star' is really foundering in darkness. Hence perhaps all the iconography: the inverted pentagrams, crosses, etc.

And then there is mega-church pastor Benny Hinn.




Similar dualities, double entendres and inversions lie at the heart of the Bush torture scandal. Firstly, on the most obvious level, the goals of torture itself as set forth by Bush administration, constitute an inversion of their own literal aim. It is exhaustively documented how torture is not a reliable method of interrogation, nor does it do much to ensure for international peace and safety.

Bush's justifications of torture constitute an inversion of reason, relying on establishing something as one thing up until a point at which its own purported identity is suddenly inverted, suddenly shifting into a state of being the thing which diametrically apposes the thing that came before.

Therefore, despite remonstrance by such figures as Secretary of State Colin Powell (who was a moderate Christian rather than a fundamentalist), Bush relied on a legal team to accomplish this Luciferian switch, beginning with assessing practices of interrogation and ending in justifying the full scale rendition.

Iconic around this period is the image of the Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box, hands attached to electric nodes, head hooded. It's hard not to associate this with another symbol of suffering. It is a deeply ironic image granted that many of his captors were likely Christian fundamentalists. The exact, almost pre-packaged quality of this irony almost feels supernatural, like a religious epiphany.

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Isle of the Dead



I built huts along the shore in the style of the Sea Indians who used to populate the rocky beaches along the far northern edges of the United States. Although my island is a south seas affair with sand like fine powder, and my huts are built of palm fronds.

If you must know, I am Swiss and my name is Erik, pronounced for reasons unknown to me, Irike. I am half Italian, although that half only shines through on moments when I have managed to set aside my longing -- my all too Germanic longing -- as I contemplate the blessedness of the blind.

My mother was a beautiful little person, nearly what you would call a midget. Although her condition left her congenitally hairless, she had the finest features I have ever seen. Even as a boy I was haunted by her beauty, a woman among women; as a young man I could not find a rival in those that courted me for my birdlike bones, my shock of slick, black hair and pigeon-toed feet.

Soon after coming of age, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions I resolved to retreat from the world of reproduction into the study of anthropology. Since a child, I had always been fascinated by Indians, the huts, the archery, the smoke signals. I found a kindred spirit in Doctor Lars Meerschaum at the University of Bern, who aside from being faculty, was also a practicing acupuncturist and lobbied against the practice of dentistry on the young or infirm.

***

"It's been done. Done, done done," said Doctor Meerschaum in his casual Dutch way, as if the matter was as much settled as the turning of the tide. "But, now, no, well, it probably wouldn't interest you..."

"What wouldn't interest me, Dr. Meerschaum? Please let me know because I am at a total loss as to what my dissertation topic will be."

We sat on one of the old stone benches lining the shady walk which led from the anthropology building to the fish pond. I was much younger then. In my memories, my youthful face collided at the end of my nose creating a sharp tip. I must have faced the world like a bloodied dagger, although I was as innocent and tearfull as a newborn.

"Well, I was going to suggest that you could research the peculiar beach huts of the Sea Indians of the Northern Coasts," Meerschaum added, his Dutch lilt making this suggestion seem like nothing at all.

I didn't spare two seconds before blurting, "But, this is just perfect, don't you see? This is just perfect, Dr. Meershchaum! Dr. Meerschaum! look at how the setting sun reflects off of the mirrored skylights of the arboretum!"

And then we spent the remains of that same refracted glare in heated conversation.

***

Of course I had heard of the Sea Indians before: the coastal tribes dwelling along the bleak northwestern stretches of the American wilderness. Backwards American policies have since forced this once proud people into a situation of total dependency on revenue secured from gambling and the sale of fire crackers.

Indeed, the fire crackers and their usage are the hardest for a man, a swiss man like myself, to understand. Patriotism to us is a foreign concept, or else it is one so inbred into us, it is like an observation. Yes, we are Swiss, what of it? I have my knife, my watch, my folk costume for special occassions, and that is all.

In my mind, America is a nation of constant explosions: a stick of dynamite ignited to mark the hour, the passing of the president in his long, black limousine down the street through the gates of the white house; screeching, smoking bombs handed out to children dressed in costumes.

It is a sad irony that the once proud race of hunter gatherers has become peddlers of the ugliest American things.

***

After my topic was resolved, time seemed to excellerate. The years went by in peaceful study. I purchased a pair of spectacles inset with the glass of a welder's fire mask to keep the outside world a murky haze. As a result, I achieved nocturnal vision which I put to use in the Swiss Mountain Rescue Squadron which was periodically called out into the foot hills around the Eiger to search for lost tourists, usually Italians. And always, we found them somewhere in their inconvenient clothing, eating or drinking something, some orange Fanta perhaps, wildly gesticulating at the setting sun as if the sun itself had led them astray.

On moments like these, the Italians standing, hands outstretched like angry limurs toward the incomprehensible golden orb, wild chimp voices prattling, I was not proud of my heritage.

Yet, despite my self-loathing condition of half-Latinate celibacy, I had already managed to encrust myself in a shell of knowledge which, as a larval creature engorges itself on its own residual discharge in order to nourish itself into a state of transformation, so I consumed and disgorged, covering the world in an informational film which had its own transformative purposes.

As the world became a reflection of my own studies, the light hurt less. The past did not jab at me like a little black boxer from New Orleans. Everything in my life revolved around the Sea Indians and their little twig huts, called Lika, built along the shores of the State of Washington which administratively is in no way related to the capital of Washington, representing instead a redoubling of the pathological homage to the founding Indian killer.

Much like swallows, the Indians wove their huts using a basic, spiral pattern, the spiral originating at the top and descending the walls of the ovular mound like the hair of a little boy tousled by a breeze. And in his hut, the Indian fisher catcher slept between his jaunts to the inlet where, shrieking in the dim, grey light, he snagged the salmon as they tried to move inland.

I created a mild sensation when, one day, I decided to erect a Lika in the middle of our beloved quad on the grassy field usually reserved for young lovers miraculously drawn to each other's bodies, possessing a desire as cosmically mutual as two planets entwined within a singular gravity.

And there I was, sitting in my Lika. It began to rain, but I was prepared with a thermos full of hot tea and a Calzone. I must say, even through my welders glasses I saw the people turn their heads and gawk at me as they passed. Finally one of these gawkers stopped and stared, raised a hand in greeting or warning and froze. I blinked. It was as if the man had always been there, a stone sentinel placed at random to remind people of a lurking hazard. I couldn't make him out until I realized who it was.

It was Doctor Meerschaum. I could tell for his broad shoulders and overly long limbs characteristic of people from excessively flat areas. In an instant, I realized that his attention was exactly what I longed for, although instead of acknowledging his greeting I turned my head as if I had not seen him and needed to attend to some passing thought. I looked off toward Wexler's Towers for a long time until I was sure he had gone.

***

And so, in study and in tragedy, my 33rd birthday came and went, and in the blink of an eye everything changed. But no event in life is so bleak as to entirely dominate the past with its own insatiable irrevocability, and so before I recount the tragedy, let me tell you about what happened along the road to rupture.

At some point between 25 and 32, I discovered that I wanted to make vinegar a lifelong passion. Ah! Vinegar, the brother of wine, a little wilder, invested with the brashness of a man who stays out all night, but as a garnish deceptively healthful and risk free. I added to my vinegar cellar gradually. Well, it wasn't a seller: more of an area in the upper part of my closet.

I discovered that a masturbation cycle of once every three days worked.

Like a never ending story written by some maniac, my dissertation grew longer and longer until it assumed the form of one of those eccentric things produced once every 50 years by friendless, Austrian janitors and salesmen who are constantly on the go but who nevertheless have the chance to amass gigantic balls of lint, yarn, or gum gathered at random from different locations across Europe.

My mother and father divorced, my mother marrying a man half her edge once formally reprimanded by the Geneva authorities for impregnating a 13-year-old Albanian prostitute. His name was Wendell Crappus and he was the partial owner of a chain of sex shops in Bavaria.

While I did not detest Crappus's company per se, although for some reason his face reminded me of axle grease, I could not stomach he and mother together. On those initial occasions when I did join them on one of their walks around Lake Geneva, the Bodensee, the Matterhorn (they enjoyed and were part of an international club of circumnavigators), something in me came to the forefront, a deeply buried homicidal impulse, a secret wish to rend human limbs and rip human flesh.

But while I did not act upon my base urges, another better man did. It was as if my secret thoughts had evaporated, exiting my left nostrel and, having assumed a gasseus form, saught another proximal host. On that fateful day in the spring of 1986, professor Meerschaumm removed his prized arrowac spear from its place above his office door and, in nothing but an orange sheet wrapped around his waste, ran amok on campus eventually hurling his artifact into the buttocks of a young, chemistry student where it lodged in the bone.

***

The institutionalization of Doctor Meerschaum left me disconsolate. My dissertation was a 3226 page mess. Without Doctor Meerschaum to guide me by the becon of his own unshakable Dutch certainity, I was lost. All of a sudden, I found myself the age of Jesus Christus, a deity in which I did not believe but respected as one cannot help but pay heed to a siren in the night. I took refuge in my mountain rescue missions. My vision had become so acute, I became Night Leader, guiding missions by the moonlight, traversing glaciers, scrambling through shale along the rims of massive canyons. And so it was, I led that fateful night mission down into the gully where I found Franciska alone, bathed in the moonlight as if swimming in a pool of desire.

I thought: only a moment like this could possibly wrench me from my fanatic celibacy.

The lost Italian was bold. She lay upon the mossy earth, her legs spread, her head propped upon what appeared to be a drained 2-liter bottle of orange Fanta. Her hair as dark as Erebus flowed down to grace her carmel shoulders. She had long, slender legs, her feet encased by impractical high-healed boots typical of Italian women in the mountains.

She lifted her legs higher and higher until until she revealed her vageoplectic occulus. Like a sleep walker I fell into her again and again. I was consumed by her. Engulfed. The years of sorrow suddenly dropped away as if severed by an invisible scalpul. I lay my head upon her thigh. For one instant the moment of inception when soul binds with fate and the world is rent from its alignment returned to me. It was as if I had come full circile and had returned to the beginning.

But when we came out of the mountains, the Italians had already begun to angrily gesticulate as if they had forgotten the fault was theirs alone. When we departed, Franceska ignored my lude gaze and clung to a man's hairy arm.

***

The experience with the Italian woman, who in my fantasies I called Franceska, or Sophia or Theresa, or Lucia, had shattered my calm. Already bruised from the loss of Dr. Meershaum, now I could not study whatsoever. I suddenly felt as if I had wasted my entire life researching the esoteric architecture of the veins layering my own brain. I felt like I had hidden away in this research from my true self, as if once, long ago, I had ignored the middle road and had made a choice to be destroyed one way, the softer way, rather than to have my guts rent from me by the vulturous beak of beauty as is the natural fate of all men.

And now, I had felt beauty's bite, and now I wanted no more of either option, and I was too old to be saved.

***

I traveled by jet to Moscow. From Moscow to Beijing. From Beijing to Tokyo. From Tokyo to Auckland, and from Auckland to the Solomon Islands where the women were as black as coal, their doubtless lithe bodies lost to my tangled, burnt vision veiled behind my welder's lenses.

And then, from the Solomon Islands, I swam. An American named Dave advised me not to. It was as if he could sense in me the impulse as we sat in the rundown hotel bar sipping water so heavily aerated it cut our throats. He had seen the urge before; in himself.

"Now, I know you're thinking about it, but don't do it!" He said before stumping back up stairs. It was then that I noticed he had an artificial leg.

To this day, I do not understand how he knew.

***

From the Solomons I swam to an island called Pete's Skag. From Pete's Skag, I swam farther north to an island my waterproof map called Sputum. My object was Sputum's little neighbor: a nameless hunk of sand and stone, which, after several weeks, I began to think of as the Isle of Meerschaum, or Indian Beach, or Nothingness or any number of names vacillating from the commemorative to the bleak.

Luckily, large ugly birds nested on the north shore providing an ample supply of eggs I harvested daily. These, the mangoes and the slow moving crabs which could not keep pace with the outgoing tide, were the simple fair of my hermitage.

As a hobby, I began to construct Lika out of palm fronds: strange ironic, tropical Lika. The beach became besotted with my creations, the design of which it occurred to me I could market to north Germans hungry for novel, thatched structures to climb into and copulate.

I garnered a reputation: the Swiss hermit who builds the beach huts, although the visitors, mainly lone bearded white men in kayaks, kept their distance. I lived on the Isle of the Dead for 25 years, and everything that came before grew infinitely less.

***

When I myself was no longer young, my mother came to visit me. By now she was an old woman, but aside from her stooped posture and the slight peach fuzz which had begun to grow on her face, her shoulders, the tops of her feet, she appeared little more than 7.

"Irike," she said. "What happened to you. I mean, this is ridiculous. We knew you were here, but we imagined you living in some kind of cabana type situation, apart from the others but within reach, as is your way. But this, this, Irike, is just unnatural," she paused, closing her eyes, inhaling deeply the sea air through her miniscule nose. "Oh, Irike. I have always had a deep capacity for enjoyment, but you. It is as if you turn everything, even this beautiful natural panorama, into an expression of idiocy."

After we circumnavigated the island together, she remounted her green canoe piloted by a Polynesian. Before vanishing around the bend, the Polynesian turned, his face twisted with rage, silently mouthing curses. I immediately understood the source of his impotent wrath and wished I could gift him back all his people's stolen years.